lucrative and history-changing relationships between presidents and leading bankers over the past century. author and former wall street executive nomi prince talks about it all. nomi, you talk about how this relationship and this power dynamic goes back over 100 years. but you pinpoint an inflection point, where it goes from bankers working with presidents in the interest of the public good, to bankers working with presidents just in their own interests to enrich themselves. it was actually a dip, because it started to enrich themselves, then the inflection point happened between the 30s and 60s. we ve been hearing a lot about lbj today. he was very close, personally close to many bankers. in fact, winthrop aldrich, one of the powerful banking families of the time, ran chase, was a very good friend of fdr.
day. and it s pretty remarkable to me how these historical perceptions of the presidency, how it changes as time passes. the way we talk about lbj, and george h.w. bush today, was not the way they were talked about when they were sitting in that office. looking 25 or 50 years from today, will we be talking about president obama in a totally different light? past is prologue, and we certainly will be. if you look at all presidents in the polling era, they all do better, sort of out of sight, out of mind, we begin to think more favorably of them. there is an exception. richard nixon still around 19%. so it is within reason. if you think about it, it s the human experience. and we tend to forget the more painful memories, and remember the good. so that s what we think of johnson and the civil rights act. we don t think of johnson, broken by the vietnam war, and sort of limping out of office. and very likely, we ll remember president obama as the guy who extended health care to
either brilliant and you ve thought of soething that nobody else could think of or you re a fool and wasting your time because there s no story. in the end, when did you start to see a story that had never been told? well, i started going down, brian, to hyde park, tothe roosevelt archives. i stared virtually from ground zero. as i srted through papers of george marshall d bill donovan and f.d.r. s paper, i realizized there was a lot of untold stories. let s pick one of those names, bill donovan. who was he? bill donovan was an authentic hero of world war i, a congressional medal of honor winner, subsequently a vastly successful wall street lawyer. now, he becomes, in effect, the first head of a central intelligence agency in the united states. franklin roosevelt appoints him in the summer of 1941 as what eventually becomes the office of strategic services. kind of a strange choice because donovan was a staunch republican, had run for governor of new york on an anti-r